YouTube Email Scraper

Extract verified contact emails from any YouTube channel — including the emails hidden in the creator's Instagram, TikTok, or Linktree bios.

What this actor does

Give the scraper a list of YouTube channel URLs and it returns every public email address the creator advertises. The scraper opens each channel's public About page, pulls channel metadata (name, handle, channel ID, description, subscriber count), and harvests every email literal it finds — including obfuscated variants like contact [at] example [dot] com, which are automatically normalised to proper addresses.

Because creators often hide their business email on Instagram or TikTok rather than on YouTube itself, the scraper also follows every Instagram, TikTok, and Linktree link it finds on the channel page and scans those bios for additional addresses. Every email is tagged with its source so you can tell a YouTube-advertised address apart from one picked up on Instagram.

The result is a clean dataset of one record per channel, with all emails deduplicated, fully qualified, and traceable back to the exact page they were found on.

Key features

• Accepts every YouTube URL format: @handle, /channel/UC..., /c/name, /user/name, or a bare @handle string
• Harvests emails from the About description, advertised hyperlinks, and mailto: anchors
• Follows Instagram, TikTok, and Linktree links and extracts emails from their bios
• Deobfuscates common anti-scraper patterns: [at], (at), AT, [dot], (dot), DOT
• Per-email source attribution — see exactly where each address came from
• Case-insensitive deduplication with stable ordering
• Transparent residential-proxy fallback — direct requests first, proxy only when blocked
• No cookies, no login, no API keys required
• Zero-null output — empty fields are omitted rather than filled with placeholders

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
channelUrls	array of strings	—	Required. YouTube channel URLs in any supported shape.
followExternalProfiles	boolean	true	Follow Instagram / TikTok / Linktree links discovered on the channel.
maxExternalPerChannel	integer	3	Cap on external profiles fetched per channel (0-20).
autoProxyFallback	boolean	true	Automatically retry through Apify residential proxy when a page looks blocked.

Example input

{
  "channelUrls": [
    "https://www.youtube.com/@Apify",
    "https://www.youtube.com/@MrBeast",
    "@MKBHD"
  ],
  "followExternalProfiles": true,
  "maxExternalPerChannel": 3,
  "autoProxyFallback": true
}

Output

One record per channel. Fields with no value are omitted.

{
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@Apify/about",
  "channelId": "UCx...",
  "channelHandle": "@Apify",
  "channelName": "Apify",
  "channelDescription": "We help businesses extract data from the web...",
  "subscriberCount": 12500,
  "emails": ["hello@apify.com", "press@apify.com"],
  "sources": [
    {"email": "hello@apify.com", "sourceUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@Apify/about", "sourceType": "channel_description"},
    {"email": "press@apify.com", "sourceUrl": "https://www.instagram.com/apify/", "sourceType": "instagram_bio"}
  ],
  "externalLinks": [
    "https://apify.com",
    "https://www.instagram.com/apify/",
    "https://twitter.com/apify"
  ],
  "scrapedAt": "2026-04-24T12:00:00+00:00"
}

Field descriptions

• channelUrl — canonical URL of the scraped About page
• channelId — YouTube's stable channel identifier (UC...)
• channelHandle — the @handle form of the channel
• channelName — human-readable channel title
• channelDescription — full About description text
• subscriberCount — resolved subscriber count (matches YouTube's on-screen value)
• emails — deduplicated list of every email discovered for the channel
• sources — one entry per email with the exact URL and source type
• externalLinks — advertised links from the About page (not all are crawled)
• scrapedAt — ISO-8601 timestamp of this run

Source types

sourceType	Where the email came from
channel_description	The channel's About description.
channel_external_link	An email embedded directly in an advertised link.
instagram_bio	Creator's Instagram profile (bio text or metadata).
tiktok_bio	Creator's TikTok profile.
linktree	A Linktree hub linked from the channel.

Error record — emitted when a channel can't be parsed, so the run never fails entirely:

{
  "type": "youtube_email_scraper_error",
  "reason": "fetch_failed",
  "message": "Could not fetch About page (blocked / offline / not found).",
  "channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@SomeClosedChannel/about",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-04-24T12:00:00+00:00"
}

Use cases

• Influencer outreach — build a ranked contact list for a shortlist of creators in a niche
• Brand partnership research — harvest business emails from your competitor's sponsored-creator roster
• Agency sourcing — quickly see which creators publish a reachable inbox vs. hide behind management
• PR and press — find the right email for an interview, quote, or product-review request
• CRM enrichment — keep your creator-contacts database synced with the emails currently advertised publicly

FAQ

Does this scraper bypass CAPTCHAs? No. The actor uses only the public About page and the public profile pages of Instagram, TikTok, and Linktree. When a page is fully blocked, the scraper emits an error record for that channel and moves on.

Do I need cookies, a login, or a YouTube API key? No. The scraper is unauthenticated and reads only publicly available data.

Will it find every email on a channel? It finds every email advertised in plain text, as a mailto: link, with common obfuscation ([at] / [dot]), and on linked Instagram / TikTok / Linktree bios. It cannot extract emails hidden behind YouTube's "View email address" click-to-reveal button — that gate requires a logged-in account and is not supported.

Does it follow every external link on a channel? No — only Instagram, TikTok, and Linktree, because those are where creators most often advertise a contact address. All external links are still listed in externalLinks so you can follow them downstream if you wish.

What if a channel has no public emails? The channel record is still emitted, just without the emails and sources fields. You can filter on the presence of emails in post-processing.

How does the proxy fallback work? If a direct request returns a suspiciously small response or a known block page, the scraper transparently retries through Apify residential proxy. Set autoProxyFallback: false to skip the retry.

How fast is it? Each channel typically takes under a second. Following external profiles adds one HTTP round-trip per profile (capped by maxExternalPerChannel).

Known limitations

• Click-to-reveal emails on YouTube are not supported. YouTube's "View email address" button requires a logged-in session; this actor is login-free by design.
• Instagram login walls occasionally show for certain regions or IP ranges. When this happens the scraper skips that bio and keeps the emails it already found elsewhere.
• TikTok region restrictions can replace a profile with an interstitial page; the scraper still extracts whatever metadata the interstitial exposes.
• Channels without a public About page (some custom-branding and music-artist channels) return a parse_failed error record.
• Subscriber counts reflect YouTube's publicly displayed rounded value (e.g. 12K → 12000). Exact counts below YouTube's display threshold are not available.